FALLING AWAKE
Pratisth Acharya

Pranav is late. He is always late. He burns his coffee, wears clothes from two days ago, and arrives at the office like a man who has been falling since birth and just hasn't hit the ground yet. This is his life—functional, fine, and utterly asleep.
Then, on the Delhi metro on an ordinary Tuesday, a woman with turquoise eyes and a poetry book looks at him and asks the one question nobody has ever asked: why do you live this way?
Her name is Aditi. She appears each morning at the same station, says things that make him stand in the middle of his apartment at midnight reconsidering everything, and vanishes at her stop into the crowd. She is not trying to fix him. She is not trying to love him. She is simply, maddeningly, awake—and being near her makes him feel the full weight of how long he has been asleep.
Falling Awake is a novel about the slow, irreversible work of becoming. Set against the heat and rhythm of Delhi—its metros and autorickshaws, its fluorescent offices and rain-soaked mornings—it follows a man learning, one small choice at a time, that a life can be chosen rather than merely survived. But when Aditi's own complicated past resurfaces, Pranav must confront a harder truth: that the person who wakes you up cannot be the reason you stay awake.
Tender, precise, and quietly devastating, this is a debut novel about presence, poetry, heartbreak, and the strange geometry of the self.

"A voice that makes you want to stop running."